The so-called "Global Class War" Trotskyist current of
Sam Marcy and Vincent Copeland was mainly centered in the SWP of Buffalo, New York, rooted
in the blast furnace industrial proletariat there.

Following World War II, the Fourth International faced a political crisis trying to
reconcile Trotsky's statement that if the war's aftermath failed to produce a new wave of
socialist revolution, all of Marxism would need to be reconsidered. Trotsky's widow
Natalia Sedova based her switch to Shachtman's politics on that premise.

In contrast, the Marcyites declared that socialist revolutions in China and Yugoslavia
had fulfilled Trotsky's expectations. For them the role of the Marxist party in capitalist
countries was to ally itself (i.e., the conscious sector of its working class) with the
victorious workers' states in a straightforward strategic display of class solidarity in a
class war that had become global.

To many, the Marcyite pro-Stalinist political orientation seemed to be the U.S. variant
of Pabloism; actually, it was the opposite. Michel Pablo's perspective was deeply
pessimistic, whereas the Marcyites were fully charged with revolutionary optimism, further
fortified by the Cuban revolution as time went on.

This stance in turn meant playing down to insignificance polemics against Stalinism,
while seeking leadership of the class through exemplary action. The Marcyites remained
uneasily as a faction within the SWP until the USSR's military invasion of Hungary in
1956, which they supported and the SWP denounced. Depending on whose version you believe,
the Marcy-Copeland faction either left (Marcy) or was expelled (Cannon), and formed
Workers World Party in 1957.

The party newspaper banner debuted with a silhouette of Lenin in one corner and Trotsky
in the other, bracing the heading, "Colored and White Unite and Fight for a WORKERS
WORLD." The founders never looked back, and from then to the present kept their
doctrinaire politics strictly internal. However, they were always fun in their taunts to
the SWP.

For example, during the Socialist Regroupment period, the United Socialist ticket
headed by [Stalinists] Otto Nathan and Annette T. Rubenstein ran for state offices in New
York in 1958, with support of the SWP. WW cadres would question the SWP orators,
"Comrades, how is it that you could not get along with those of us who regard the
Hungarian uprising as a bourgeois nationalist insurgency, but then you can bloc
politically with those who call it a fascist counter-revolution?"

At about that time, the proletarian left wing (New York waterfront, Cleveland
industrial, and California lumber) branches of the Communist Party were being expelled,
after delivering their anti-Foster/Dennis resolution, "Our Reply to the Conciliators
of Revisionism," and Harry Haywood's "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro
Question" [Black Belt self-determination]. When that group established the
Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in the
United States, WW ran a friendly headline directed to them, "Welcome, Comrades!"

The POC paper, Marxist-Leninist Vanguard, retorted, "Trotskyism is Counter-
Revolution and Nothing Else!" Smarting at that, the Lenin and Trotsky busts
disappeared from the WW paper, never to return, and virtually all mention of Trotsky
vanished forever from its pages. Prior to the emergence of Progressive Labor, WW and POC
were the leading U.S. Maoists, both of which had direct ties to China at a time when the
Sino-Soviet split had not yet been publicly acknowledged. (But the POC took up Mao's
anti-Tito campaign with characteristic zeal, while WW continued to regard Tito's
revolution as a model.)

True to its fundamental principles, WW has always remained primarily action- oriented.
Its pamphlets and books are scarcely theoretical, though they are steeped in historical
analysis and idiom as a platform for agitation. The party is the most skillful
practitioner of united front strategy -- not just tactics -- on the U.S. left, preferring
to win influence and leadership through militancy rather than through ideological
victories.

Despite that posture, Copeland was an exemplary scholar, with whom I corresponded
cordially for several years despite our political differences.

WW has created mass front organizations to meet contingencies -- Youth Against War and
Fascism, United Labor Action, the American Servicemen's Union, and others -- but usually
participates in the broader mass coalitions as the most militant wing.

The passing of the founders seems to have opened the door to change just a crack. Two
weeks ago WW ran an editorial directly criticizing the CP for its opposition to the
impeachment of Clinton, urging workers to retain their independence and distance from the
bourgeois morass.